Big tech is now too-big-to-fail

From Rana Foroohar‘s Don’t Be Evil pg 208:

At the very least, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the other systemically important platforms should be forced to disclose political advertising in the same way that television, print, and radio firms do. When in the financial markets, they should be forced to stay in their own sandbox the same way that their competitors, the big banks, are. When trafficking in other sorts of personal information, like, for example, healthcare information (which can be collected and sold via any number of health and wellness apps that we all use), they should be bound by the same privacy rules that the healthcare industry follows. Big Tech isn’t special. But it is systemically important. It sits in the middle of communications, media, and advertising markets, in the same way that big banks sit in the middle of financial markets. The Fed or the FTC can step in when structurally important financial institutions are both making markets and participating in them; the FTC should do the same with Big Tech. In fact, I’d argue that we need a specific regulatory body for the technology industry, a topic I’ll come back to in the last chapter.